Agile Project Management For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3

Why Being Agile Works Better

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering the benefits of agile project management

Comparing agile approaches to historical approaches

Finding out why people like agile techniques

Agile approaches work well in the real world. Why is this? In this chapter, you examine the mechanics of how agile processes improve the way people work and how they prevent burdensome overhead. Comparisons with historical methods highlight the improvements agile techniques bring.

When talking about agile project management advantages, the bottom line is twofold: project success and stakeholder satisfaction.

Evaluating Agile Benefits

The agile concept of project management is different from previous methodologies. As mentioned in Chapter 1, agile approaches address key challenges of historical project management methods such as waterfall, but they also go much deeper. Agile processes provide a framework for how we want to work — how we naturally function when we solve problems and complete tasks.

Historical methods of project management were developed not for contemporary development lifecycles, such as software development, but for less complex systems. They also were adapted ...